"Free Will Hunting" was perhaps the best episode of the season so far. As usual, it plays fast and loose with Bender's nature, abilities, and history; after all, didn't Bender overcome his programming and gain free will when he was electrocuted in the pilot episode? It also embraces Small-Universe Syndrome more than ever by making Farnsworth the programmer of all robots, although I suppose there's some precedent for that in earlier Mom episodes. But it's in service to a story with a nice philosophical angle to it, a solid SF-type plot using the show's robot character as a vehicle for talking allegorically about questions of human nature.

And really, it's not like the episode ever actually confirmed that Bender lacked free will. If anything, it did the opposite; despite what everyone said about him lacking free will, he was clearly making decisions throughout even when he believed he couldn't. And the nature of Farnsworth's device, the impossibility of knowing whether it was turned on or off, was something of a symbol for the question of free will in general.

Nice to see the "Robot Homeworld" again too. We haven't seen it since "Fear of a Bot Planet" way back in season one. A lot of the material was just rehashed gags -- Silence! But there was enough new stuff to make it interesting.

I'd say the ep showed that robots DO have free will they just think they don't.

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Which is pretty much what the episode implied throughout. This wasn't a story about whether robots have free will, it was a story about how Bender was affected by his belief that he didn't have free will.

My view on the subject, if I may wax philosophical for a bit, is that free will isn't a yes-or-no question, that there's no such thing as absolute free will or absolute lack of it. There are simply different levels of constraints upon our degrees of freedom, and those constraints change in different contexts. For instance, if I'm in an open field, I have the freedom to choose where I want to move anywhere I want in two dimensions, but very little freedom to choose how I move in the third. However, if I then fall off a cliff, my freedom to choose my direction of motion becomes immensely more constrained. Similarly, a person living as part of a society has more constraints on personal freedom than a person living alone on a desert island, because that person is constrained by the need to consider other people's rights and entitlements. So it's a balance of different freedoms that places some constraints on all of them.

On a psychological or neurological level, our free will is constrained by our personalities, our beliefs, our inhibitions, our hangups. We might theoretically be free to make a choice in either of two ways, but our personalities might make it impossible for us to make one of those choices (for instance, there's no way I'd ever choose to become a beekeeper because I'm phobic about insects). Sometimes our own habits of thought trap us into consistently making a choice the same way over and over (for instance, always sabotaging relationships, always being too afraid to ask out a girl even when she's clearly interested, always choosing to get involved with an abusive man, etc.), and it may take a monumental effort to break those habits and reshape the constraints on our free will.

So it's relative. We have some freedom of choice, but it's within various limits, some external, some internal. Bender has the freedom to choose whether or not he commits a crime, but as a matter of habit and inclination, he's going to choose to commit it, unless some other powerful constraint comes into play to compel him to choose otherwise. For instance, if he has to choose between committing a crime and letting Fry die, he'll probably wrestle with it for a while, but will ultimately have no choice but to save his best friend.

And it's really no different for the rest of us. We call it programming where robots are concerned, but is it really so different from our own personalities, habits, and reflexes? Fry is programmed to be a doofus. Leela is programmed to be aggressive. Hermes is programmed to be a bureaucrat. Our actions and choices are shaped by who we are, by how our innate psychology and lifetime habits dictate our choices. Perhaps it's not so much a question of whether we have free will, but whether we choose to exert it. Most of us never really do, because we just unthinkingly follow our pre-existing inclinations and don't stop to question if there's another way. Exercising free will is about confronting our own "programming" and seeking to rise above it. And that's what Bender was doing here.

And it's so refreshing to have another Futurama episode that inspires thoughtful discussion like this.

I love the Professor so I appreciated having an episode focusing on him and his past. Also I really loved that Near Death Star episode back in the day and I'm delighted they revisited it! I thought the Matrix gag was funny because I've defended that premise before (it's not about being efficient it's about punishing and enslaving humanity).

My favorite bit was the reveal that the Professor was the evil mad genius older brother

My favorite bit was the reveal that the Professor was the evil mad genius older brother

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I should've seen that one coming. (Instead I was half-expecting it to turn out that the "older son" was named Ogden and had been adopted by a family named Wernstrom!!)

But what does it say about the Farnsworths that they apparently had two estranged sons who never wanted to speak to them again? I mean, if they were on good terms with one of their sons, then they wouldn't have been confused about which one the Professor was.